Fans of political affairs remember Julian Assange and Edward Snowden’s “soap operas” that have made headlines in recent years. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, found refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London from 2012 to 2019. After long legal diatribes (2019-2024), he agreed to plead guilty to espionage. Assange was released from a British prison, and he returned to Australia, pending trial. For his part, Snowden was charged with disclosing sensitive information harmful to American national security. He fled to Moscow in 2013, where he obtained Russian citizenship.
Episodes of this kind have kept journalists, diplomats, politicians, and fans of the sensational mesmerized and intrigued. If we go back further, we can read controversial information about other “soap operas.’’ This applies to hostages or diplomats freed thanks to security transactions involving state and non-state entities. One can also come across narratives associated with the internal politics of states, where bargaining and blackmailing have been used.
The most convenient word to describe this sort of story is with the idea of a political “gate.” The textbook example is Watergate (1972-1974), the infamous case of espionage in the offices of the Democratic Party that led to the resignation of the Republican president Richard Nixon. The Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s during President Ronald Reagan’s second term is also worth mentioning. This case concerned the smuggling of arms to Iran in order to finance the Contras in Nicaragua, despite the embargo decreed against Tehran.
These doors open only to close again
However, this gate or door that is open to the general public, is in fact aimed at closing all access to the most remote corners, likely to break out of uncontrollable scandals later on. In this regard, people often say that to nip in the bud a case that smells bad, suffice it to create a commission of inquiry, followed by sub-committees, a process that never ends. The aim is to get people bored. The case is closed.
Fans of the seventh art and film lovers remember Michel Cimino’s excellent feature film “Heaven’s Gate,” released in 1980. It was artistically, aesthetically, and thematically a must-have, but commercially a fiasco. The reason for this was the daring way in which Cimino depicted what is commonly referred to as the “outline of American democracy” based on real events that took place between 1889 and 1893. Not all open doors lead to paradise.
Well, when it comes to “Gate,” I like to share an incredible story called, in small diplomatic circles, “The Cheesegate.”.
We are in 2013-2014-2015. The international media are monopolized by the coverage of classic conflicts that enlist people’s interest while leaving a room for miscellaneous news that does not bother major state and non-state decision-makers.
However, as the weeks went by, these media decided to devote a large space to the impact of the “Arab Spring” on the neighboring regions. Indeed, since 2012, the year this spring was triggered, things have begun to take an unexpected turn for political and strategic planners in Europe and the United States.
In the Arab periphery, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Ali Saleh of Yemen, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya were ousted from power or terminated. Other leaders narrowly escaped it. In the euphoria of the implementation of the paradigm of regime change as a sine qua non condition for the implementation of ‘’true democracy’’ in the Arab periphery, Western, American, and European planners started to nurture the idea of bringing about a “Caucasian Spring.”
Obviously, the political planners and military strategists’ move was aiming to achieve at least four objectives. First, digging deeper into the tunnel of disagreement between Russia and its former South Caucasus republics.
Secondly, building on the Georgian precedent (unilateral independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, recognized only by Russia in 2008) in order to advance the painstaking project of the Eastern Partnership.
Third, sending a strong signal to Turkey that the Europeans have their say in what Ankara believes to be its cultural and civilizational backyard. Fourth, sowing trouble throughout the Caucasian and Central Asian space in order to bend Iran’s position at a time when the negotiations on the nuclear issue were evolving in a zigzag fashion.
The abovementioned move, as a piece of diplomatic and security bargaining, reflected, in fact, concerns that Russia would regain and re-shape her former vital space. The aim was meant to prevent the Eurasian Economic Union Russia launched in 2014 with Armenia, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan as founding members from weakening the Eastern Partnership, which was already going through difficult times.
Indeed, the implementation of the Eastern Partnership (2009) suffered the same fate as the Union for the Mediterranean (2008). Both initiatives sought to transcend the endemic disputes of the Caucasian partners and those of the southern shore of the Mediterranean through economic ascendancy, but without going so far as to establish a viable partnership.
Parody of Democracy
This was a mistaken political and diplomatic assessment. It reminds me of a similar one a few Arab countries made (1991–1994) in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, these countries offered their support to the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia, wrongly believing that their assistance would give a new birth to the Islamic religion. They thought that Islam had been dragged through the mud during the Soviet time in these two regions.
However, in our Cheesegate case, the idea of sharing is associated with that of the saying “The winner takes it all.”. The story takes place in Azerbaijan. In the midst of pressure European countries were exerting on Baku, under the pretext of getting it to reform its political system, Azerbaijani citizens, no doubt in good faith, were openly supported to participate in greeting this sort of job done.
Obviously, the quest for more openness in any political system is a sound aspiration and should be highlighted. Yet, in the case of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, the move was fundamentally mercantile. It was some sort of preaching the false in order to have the truth. But even the missing through was false.
As for Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, the focus was on the geopolitics of hydrocarbons, with natural gas as the highlight of the show. In the case of the other Central Asian countries, the objective was to stop Turkey and China from scoring more points in the region. Turkey was keen to reinvent what she believes was her golden age in the region. China was in the process of fine-tuning its Silk Road strategy.
However, the behind-the-scenes objective the Europeans were aiming to achieve, so to speak, was to agree on how to benefit from the pipeline projects that Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan were carrying out with the declared objective of supplying Europe and, by the same token, help the Europeans reduce their dependence on Russian gas.
It is in this atmosphere that an Azerbaijani human rights activist found a shelter in a European embassy. He received the appropriate treatment in such situations. Everything was going well until the day when it was no longer possible to feed him without the help of the other European embassies.
The Azerbaijani human rights activist was very fond of cheeses. He ate as much as he could, to the point of gaining extra pounds. Worse, the stock of cheese was reduced to a level not tolerated at all. That’s when the story of Caucasian Cheesegate was born. The European diplomatic representations were therefore faced with two problems.
First, how to solve the Azerbaijani host’s food issue. Secondly, how to do to ensure that case wouldn’t encroach on the issues related to the geopolitics of energy. Indeed, the battle raged between European diplomats to guide or influence Azerbaijani and Turkmen decision-makers and convince them to choose between the gas pipeline projects that were the subject of close negotiations: Nabucco and TAP (Transcaucasian gas pipeline project).
Later, Nabucco will be put on hold. On the one hand, because of its expensive cost. On the other hand, because of the headache of the Northern Corridor project launched in 1997 and the Southern Corridor, which was to be launched in 2015. For the record, the Northern Corridor suffered collateral damage related to the war between Russia and Ukraine in September 2022.
Ironically, the European Union’s countries, which prided themselves on having similar positions on the South Caucasus and Russia’s affairs, separately adopted dichotomous positions on the gas pipeline projects.
This was not a big surprise to oil and gas experts. These divergences had been recorded in the aftermath of the independence of the former Caucasian republics, particularly over the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline (BTC, 1993-1999) and the Baku-Supas oil pipeline (1994-1999).
The unresolved question at the time was whether or not Armenia should be involved in the tracing and transit of oil and to what extent Georgia and Turkey should be a winning bet. The underlying idea was to find a way out of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through economic ascendancy in a scenario that was difficult for the state parties to the conflict to accept, mainly Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia.
Suffice it to say that Cheesegate has smoked out the behind-the-scenes diplomatic game of divergent European interests. The Azerbaijani human rights activist, envied for enjoying cheese too much, was in fact only a pretext. He was the highlight of the show, as were those who had been in the Watergate scandal, the Contra soap opera, the Snowdon’s saga, and the Assange’s drama. These have shown politics in its dual dynamics of hidden script and public transcript.
For their part, human rights activists found themselves between the hammer of their legitimate aspiration and the anvil of unfulfilled promises their foreign state supporters pledge. Many of them were so naïve that they got their brushes mixed up trying to draw sketches of missing hope and optimism.
The story told in these lines indirectly raises the question of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive foreign financial assistance. They are suspected of colluding with foreign countries to destabilize their countries. The countries that support them are asking them to be more engaged in implementing the script written to their attention. The countries where the political NGOs are very active require that financial assistance to these organizations be transparent. A difficult equation hard to solve, which, ironically, gives birth to such incredible stories as the one of the Cheesegate.
